A bad press for Farage doesn't automatically help the Tories

It cannot do Nigel Farage good to have his character and finances queried on the front page of the Times for a second consecutive day. The question is how much harm it does. Some Ukip supporters will be receptive to the party’s line of rebuttal, which is that the whole thing is a smear by agents of the Tory party disguised as journalists. After all, wouldn’t it be just like the Establishment to use its house journal to attack the leader of anti-Establishment resistance?

That defence has the virtue of consistency with Ukip’s wider message, but it also comes across as cranky. The list that the party published yesterday of links between senior figures at the Times and the Conservative party is in the idiom of conspiracy theory website. The same technique, applied with a little more imagination, could probably be used to demonstrate that Times journalists are connected to 9/11 and Mossad.

Clearly, Ukip doesn’t enjoy being treated like other political parties, which is to be expected from a party that touts itself as the antidote to politics. Less clear is how resilient Farage is to such treatment. There is a certain kind of populist swagger that is immune to bad news. Scandal, gaffe and embarrassment bounce off the likes of Boris Johnson and Silvio Berlusconi (in his hey day). Perhaps the Ukip leader is made of similar non-stick stuff?

The Tories hope not. The party has a notional plan for clawing back support from Ukip but there isn’t much evidence yet that it works. The method is to remind Farageist voters over and over again that the kinds of things they like – a tougher immigration policy; a referendum on leaving the EU; benefit crackdowns – can only be delivered in practice by a Conservative administration. A ballot cast for Ukip only nourishes the Europhile Ed Miliband. Some errant Tories can be wooed back to Cameron’s camp with this argument but not, I suspect, as many as the party’s strategists hope.

The mistake that some Conservatives make is in thinking that Ukip, being a relatively new party, commands tenuous loyalty. In this view, the smaller the body in the political firmament, the weaker its gravitational pull; so if a giant, such as the Tory party, moves in close, voters are dragged into its orbit. This is the traditional arrogance of the ancient party towards parvenu challengers and recedent suggests it is misplaced. The presumption that voters have nowhere else to go is usually wrong, as Labour has found in many of its former seats now held by Liberal Democrats; also in Bradford (Respect); in Brighton (Green) and, above all, in Scotland, where the demise of the Tories accompanied a surge in Nationalist support.

The tidy Labour-Conservative duopoly has been slowly unravelling since the 1950s. There remain strains of ancestral allegiance in the electorate. There are families where the political stripes of Blue or Red are worn tribally, like football colours. But that trend is in decline. Anyone who has interrogated voting intentions on the street – whether during the various by-elections of this parliament or at other times – will testify to high levels of contempt for politics in general and the more familiar parties in particular. One such recent conversation stuck in my mind. On a trip to Cambridge I got into a conversation about politics with a woman – early 30s, with young children – who had voted Lib Dem in 2010. The reason: “They had never been in before.” That attachment had since been shed. The current intention was to not vote at all or to support Ukip, because “they’ll shut the gates.”

Anecdote is a poor instrument in political forecasting but the episode was instructive as a reminder that people do not follow the laws of uniform swing that party strategists want them to obey. I have had numerous similar conversations: a Muslim taxi driver from Slough who is voting Ukip because the newer class of immigrant is giving the more established immigrant communities a bad name; a nurse in Manchester who is voting Ukip in protest against government cuts, the bedroom tax and high energy bills. (Miliband’s campaigning on those issues was discounted because Labour “caused all of the problems.”)

Voting intentions are rarely set by comparing a list of personal policy preferences with a party’s menu of promises and plumping for the best match. The Tory strategy for winning support back from Ukip presumes people have some flowchart in their heads that chases specific aims and arrives at the conclusion that returning a Tory MP is the most efficient way to see those aims realised. But what if one of the overriding aims is not to support the Tories? What if the function of voting is not to choose the government, because governing parties - “they” - are all the same, but rather to express a preference for none of “them”?

In that case, the exposure of Farage as a charlatan, or just another politician, will not be sufficient to steer voters back to more mainstream candidates. It is a fallacy to think that all Ukip supporters are the lost sheep of Labour or Conservative parties who have gone wandering mid-term and can be rounded up in time for a general election. It is also a mistake to try telling them they are Tories and just haven’t noticed it yet. Some MPs have realised this and wonder whether the penny has dropped in No10. “The leadership is terrified of Farage and doesn’t really have a clue what to do about him,” one young backbencher recently told me. Another prominent Conservative warns that anger against Cameron and the political elite is entrenched enough that even a rising economic tide will not wash it away: “It can’t be bought off with an improvement in living conditions.” (A view the same source describes as “deeply seditious” in terms of the official party narrative.)

If Ukip loses its anti-Establishment allure, there is no guarantee that its votes will seep back to the old parties. Farage didn’t create the anti-politics mood in the country, nor does he own it. Meanwhile, David Cameron hopes that voters who doubt Ed Miliband is up to being Prime Minister will come to realise that the Tories are the only credible option on the ballot paper. He may be disappointed. The lesson of recent history – in by-elections; general elections; local elections; European elections – is that large swathes of the British public really don’t need much encouragement to vote something other than Conservative.

MP Michelle Thomson's full speech on rape at 14: "I am a survivor"

On Thursday, the independent MP for Edinburgh West Michelle Thomson used a debate marking the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to describe her own experience of rape. Thomson, 51, said she wanted to break the taboo among her generation about speaking about the subject.

MPs listening were visibly moved by the speech, and afterwards Thomson tweeted she was "overwhelmed" by the response.

Here is her speech in full:

I am going to relay an event that happened to me many years ago. I want to give a very personal perspective to help people, both in this place and outside, understand one element of sexual violence against women.

When I was 14, I was raped. As is common, it was by somebody who was known to me. He had offered to walk me home from a youth event. In those days, everybody walked everywhere - it was quite common. It was early evening. It was not dark. I was wearing— I am imagining and guessing—jeans and a sweatshirt. I knew my way around where I lived - I was very comfortable - and we went a slightly differently way, but I did not think anything of it. He told me that he wanted to show me something in a wooded area. At that point, I must admit that I was alarmed. I did have a warning bell, but I overrode that warning bell because I knew him and, therefore, there was a level of trust in place. To be honest, looking back at that point, I do not think I knew what rape was. It was not something that was talked about. My mother never talked to me about it, and I did not hear other girls or women talking about it.

It was mercifully quick and I remember first of all feeling surprise, then fear, then horror as I realised that I quite simply could not escape, because obviously he was stronger than me. There was no sense, even initially, of any sexual desire from him, which, looking back again, I suppose I find odd. My senses were absolutely numbed, and thinking about it now, 37 years later, I cannot remember hearing anything when I replay it in my mind. As a former professional musician who is very auditory, I find that quite telling. I now understand that your subconscious brain—not your conscious brain—decides on your behalf how you should respond: whether you take flight, whether you fight or whether you freeze. And I froze, I must be honest.

Afterwards I walked home alone. I was crying, I was cold and I was shivering. I now realise, of course, that that was the shock response. I did not tell my mother. I did not tell my father. I did not tell my friends. And I did not tell the police. I bottled it all up inside me. I hoped briefly—and appallingly—that I might be pregnant so that that would force a situation to help me control it. Of course, without support, the capacity and resources that I had within me to process it were very limited.

I was very ashamed. I was ashamed that I had “allowed this to happen to me”. I had a whole range of internal conversations: “I should have known. Why did I go that way? Why did I walk home with him? Why didn’t I understand the danger? I deserved it because I was too this, too that.” I felt that I was spoiled and impure, and I really felt revulsion towards myself.

Of course, I detached from the child that I had been up until then. Although in reality, at the age of 14, that was probably the start of my sexual awakening, at that time, remembering back, sex was “something that men did to women”, and perhaps this incident reinforced that early belief.​
I briefly sought favour elsewhere and I now understand that even a brief period of hypersexuality is about trying to make sense of an incident and reframing the most intimate of acts. My oldest friends, with whom I am still friends, must have sensed a change in me, but because I never told them they did not know of the cause. I allowed myself to drift away from them for quite a few years. Indeed, I found myself taking time off school and staying at home on my own, listening to music and reading and so on.

I did have a boyfriend in the later years of school and he was very supportive when I told him about it, but I could not make sense of my response - and it is my response that gives weight to the event. I carried that guilt, anger, fear, sadness and bitterness for years.

When I got married 12 years later, I felt that I had a duty tell my husband. I wanted him to understand why there was this swaddled kernel of extreme emotion at the very heart of me, which I knew he could sense. But for many years I simply could not say the words without crying—I could not say the words. It was only in my mid-40s that I took some steps to go and get help.

It had a huge effect on me and it fundamentally - and fatally - undermined my self-esteem, my confidence and my sense of self-worth. Despite this, I am blessed in my life: I have been happily married for 25 years. But if this was the effect of one small, albeit significant, event in my life stage, how must it be for those women who are carrying it on a day-by-day basis?

I thought carefully about whether I should speak about this today, and it was people’s intake of breath and the comment, “What? You’re going to talk about this?”, that motivated me to do it, because there is still a taboo about sharing this kind of information. Certainly for people of my generation, it is truly shocking to talk in public about this sort of thing.

As has been said, rape does not just affect the woman; it affects the family as well. Before my mother died early of cancer, I really wanted to tell her, but I could not bring myself to do it. I have a daughter and if something happened to her and she could not share it with me, I would be appalled. It was possibly cowardly, but it was an act of love that meant that I protected my mother.

As an adult, of course I now know that rape is not about sex at all - it is all about power and control, and it is a crime of violence. I still pick up on when the myths of rape are perpetuated form a male perspective: “Surely you could have fought him off. Did you scream loudly enough?” And the suggestion by some men that a woman is giving subtle hints or is making it up is outrageous. Those assumptions put the woman at the heart of cause, when she should be at the heart of effect. A rape happens when a man makes a decision to hurt someone he feels he can control. Rapes happen because of the rapist, not because of the victim.

We women in our society have to stand up for each other. We have to be courageous. We have to call things out and say where things are wrong. We have to support and nurture our sisters as we do with our sons. Like many women of my age, I have on occasion encountered other aggressive actions towards me, both in business and in politics. But one thing that I realise now is that I am not scared and he was. I am not scared. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

Julia Rampen is the editor of The Staggers, The New Statesman's online rolling politics blog. She was previously deputy editor at Mirror Money Online and has worked as a financial journalist for several trade magazines.